Debugging CDNs: A Need for Change

It’s a Saturday afternoon: An email from a customer drove me to start troubleshooting an issue they were experiencing with Amazon S3. They were experiencing random high wait time, usually an indication of a problem with communication back to some sort of an origin system. Should’ve been a piece of cake, right?

Well, it wasn’t. Each CDN out there uses different debug headers and some don’t send anything back, and in this case, S3 was even more difficult to work with because the only thing available was a useless set of headers:

Please, let’s all urge our CDN friends to adopt a common troubleshooting header structure (by the way, Limelight, could you not use the same x-header to display 3 different things?) and CDNetworks you are wasting bytes with that text to hire people!

Example:

X-Served-By: ABC

X-Status: HIT / MISS

X-Time: in milliseconds

X-Time-Origin: in millisecond

X-Transaction-ID

We thank all of the CDNs out there for making the internet faster and the user experience better, but the time has come to make time to troubleshoot faster and easier as well.